All White People Must Confront How the System Only Works in Total Whiteness
I was born in 1961, after Brown v. Board but before the Civil Rights Act.
My childhood in the upstate of South Carolina included the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy as well as vivid memories of my mother’s family living through the racial unrest in nearby Asheville, North Carolina and my uncle being shipped off to the Vietnam War.
My parents had been raised in the 1940s and 1950s throughout North and South Carolina; they were among the white Americans who disapproved of King, and I recall vividly my parents’ animosity for Muhammad Ali that sat next to their anger at the mainstream media for bringing down Richard Nixon.
I was born in 1961, but I was baptized and washed daily in whiteness.
I believed in whiteness even as I was conditioned never to see it because my accusatory gaze was trained on blackness, and any racial identity not white.
These were the lessons of my home, my community, my school, and nearly every moment of the media I was consuming through news or entertainment.
My history books, TV shows, movies, novels, and comic books were filled with white saviors—and all that was wrong with the world shaded in darkness, blackness.
By the time I entered college during the fall of Jimmy Carter and the rise of CONTINUE READING: All White People Must Confront How the System Only Works in Total Whiteness – radical eyes for equity
